‘You are reserved for a great Monday!’ Fine, but Sunday will never end.—Kafka

January 22, 2006

Fundamentalist Scum

Forgive me for momentarily lowering the tone around here, but anyone who at this point refuses to acknowledge the sinister parallels between the new-age mysticism of "President" George Walker Bush and the ideology of what is popularly referred to by the signifier, "Bin Laden" or (self-)flatteringly romanticized as "Islamofascism," in the sense that both foreclose equally on any possible future, like all good metonymies, is quite possibly living with their head fundamentally up their own ass, walking in circles on the motherfucking moon.

There's a reason they call them wackos behind their backs, you know (it's a nicer, more comment-inviting word than scum, surely; wackos at least are monetarily useful). The real scum are the scammers responsible for mass murder, the cozy fundamentalist terrorist metonymies, of course.

(Jon Stewart meanwhile, will of course continue his trivializing fun-poking at the strangely lovable, pretend-populist Dumbo, whilst reserving the brunt of satirical cruelty for life-long activist Belafonte and socialist playboy Chavez. But it'd sure be nice if there were a more courageous art for our sake out there. All of which is to suggest, only, that art which succeeds in raising the very question of art perhaps cannot help but be the stuff of a desperately-needed more literate politics (cf. Benjamin). How's that for snobby effete elitism?)

Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature
of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior
official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the
connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the
war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the
former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here”
to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by
the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the
victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the man,” the
former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a
referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another
manifestation of divine purpose.

The former senior
official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection
visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: “I
said to the President, ‘We’re not winning the war.’ And he asked, ‘Are
we losing?’ I said, ‘Not yet.’ ” The President, he said, “appeared displeased” with that answer.

“I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he couldn’t hear it.”

There
are grave concerns within the military about the capability of the U.S.
Army to sustain two or three more years of combat in Iraq. Michael
O’Hanlon, a specialist on military issues at the Brookings Institution,
told me, “The people in the institutional Army feel they don’t have the
luxury of deciding troop levels, or even participating in the debate.
They’re planning on staying the course until 2009. I can’t believe the
Army thinks that it will happen, because there’s no sustained drive to
increase the size of the regular Army.” O’Hanlon noted that “if the
President decides to stay the present course in Iraq some troops would
be compelled to serve fourth and fifth tours of combat by 2007 and
2008, which could have serious consequences for morale and competency
levels.”

Many of the military’s most senior generals
are deeply frustrated, but they say nothing in public, because they
don’t want to jeopardize their careers. The Administration has “so
terrified the generals that they know they won’t go public,” a former
defense official said. A retired senior C.I.A. officer with knowledge
of Iraq told me that one of his colleagues recently participated in a
congressional tour there. The legislators were repeatedly told, in
meetings with enlisted men, junior officers, and generals that “things
were fucked up.” But in a subsequent teleconference with Rumsfeld, he
said, the generals kept those criticisms to themselves.

One
person with whom the Pentagon’s top commanders have shared their
private views for decades is Representative John Murtha, of
Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations
Subcommittee. The President and his key aides were enraged when, on
November 17th, Murtha gave a speech in the House calling for a
withdrawal of troops within six months. The speech was filled with
devastating information. For example, Murtha reported that the number
of attacks in Iraq has increased from a hundred and fifty a week to
more than seven hundred a week in the past year. He said that an
estimated fifty thousand American soldiers will suffer “from what I
call battle fatigue” in the war, and he said that the Americans were
seen as “the common enemy” in Iraq. He also took issue with one of the
White House’s claims—that foreign fighters were playing the major role
in the insurgency. Murtha said that American soldiers “haven’t captured
any in this latest activity”—the continuing battle in western Anbar
province, near the border with Syria. “So this idea that they’re coming
in from outside, we still think there’s only seven per cent.”

Murtha’s
call for a speedy American pullout only seemed to strengthen the White
House’s resolve. Administration officials “are beyond angry at him,
because he is a serious threat to their policy—both on substance and
politically,” the former defense official said. Speaking at the Osan
Air Force base, in South Korea, two days after Murtha’s speech, Bush
said, “The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war
against humanity. . . . If they’re not stopped, the terrorists will be
able to advance their agenda to develop weapons of mass destruction, to
destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, and to break our will and
blackmail our government into isolation. I’m going to make you this
commitment: this is not going to happen on my watch.”

“The
President is more determined than ever to stay the course,” the former
defense official said. “He doesn’t feel any pain. Bush is a believer in
the adage ‘People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.’ ” He
said that the President had become more detached, leaving more issues
to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. “They keep him in the gray
world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,” the former
defense official said. Bush’s public appearances, for example, are
generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at
military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was
also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to
similar public forums. “Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White
House,” the former official said, “but Bush has no idea.”

9 Comments

Charles, thank you for posting the article by Hersh. He really is one of the last of the "independent" mainstream journalists. As I recall, he has the honor of being called "the closest thing journalism has to a terrorist" by Richard Pearle, the one and only prince of darkness. That seems to me the highest praise one could ever wish for.

Pre-9/11 there were multiple friendly contacts between "Islamofascists" and the American right. They share a violent opposition to feminism, gay rights, socialism, secularity, sexual freedom, and of course atheism, and they share an attitude of punitive schadenfreude toward sinners. They also have a basically magical view of the world (Pat Robertson's gone so wacky that he's embarassing the rest of them, but at the grass roots he's still important.)

I agree with you Charles. Isn't it very obliging of Mr. Bin Laden to issue a message just as the controversy over domestic surveillance is heating up - it seems he wants to do his part in ensuring that the Bush Junta can justify its policies to a largely passive (and frightened) American public.

Blip you are certainly correct. I found the following commentary by a former NSA employee of interest:

"What's not right about the Osama Bin Laden audio tape. One thing that the Bush administration does well is manage perceptions of the public. Amid protests over the NSA wiretapping, the extension of the Patriot Act, and the nomination of neo-Fascist Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, an audio tape on Osama Bin Laden is sent to Al Jazzera. On the tape, Bin Laden suddenly veers from being a traditional right-wing Wahhabi fanatic to the right of the House of Saud to a leftist progressive. The tape by Bin Laden was quickly verified as "authentic" by a CIA that is now firmly in the grasp of neo-cons under Porter Goss.

However, the tape is an obvious fake being used by the Bush administration to scare Americans into believing "Al Qaeda" is making plans for another attack and an attempt to link Bin Laden to Democrats.

The reason the tape is as phony as Niger yellowcake documents and Saddam's weapons of mass destruction is as plain as day. "Bin Laden" allegedly quotes from the introduction of a book written by long-time Washington, DC progressive author and journalist and a friend of mine, Bill Blum. Bill was once an editor and contributor to Covert Action Quarterly, a magazine devoted to exposing CIA operations like the arming, funding, and training of Bin Laden and his mujaheddin guerrillas during the Afghan-Soviet war.

The Bush perception managers are either incredibly stupid or are trying to ensnare liberal journalists as aiders and abettors of Al Qaeda, something that is certainly within their scope. Bin Laden allegedly quotes the following passage from Blum's book, Rogue State: "If you (Americans) are sincere in your desire for peace and security, we have answered you. And if Bush decides to carry on with his lies and oppression, then it would be useful for you to read the book Rogue State, which states in its introduction: 'If I were president, I would stop the attacks on the United States: First I would give an apology to all the widows and orphans and those who were tortured. Then I would announce that American interference in the nations of the world has ended once and for all.'" However, this quote is not from Rogue State, again, pointing to a very bad forgery of the Bin Laden audiotape. No sooner had the alleged Bin Laden tape been released, neo-con activist Cliff Kincaid was already spinning nonsense about Blum and his publisher, Common Courage Press of Monroe, Maine, being part of some sort of pro-Bin Laden progressive and liberal "Fifth Columnist" grouping in the United States."
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

As for the sudden success of his book, Blum says 2,000 copies were reprinted in November by the publisher, Common Courage Press. If there is a rush to buy the book, he says, the publisher is too poor to take advantage of heightened demand. "